Federal scientists can again research gun violence

Saturday, 19 January 2013 21:44

Mark Rosenberg and his colleagues were forced to stop their work at the point of a gun — or at least at the insistence of National Rifle Association.

In 1996, Rosenberg was director of the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control (NCIPC). It was then that Congress, at the behest of the National Rifle Association, stopped federally funded gun-related research by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which includes NCIPC.

Now, President Obama wants the government to resume gun violence research, as he outlined Wednesday in his plan to reduce deaths and injuries from firearms.

“We don’t benefit from ignorance,” he said. “We don’t benefit from not knowing the science of this epidemic of violence.”

Yet, for nearly two decades researchers — federal employees and grantees — have not conducted the kind of scientific inquiry into gun violence that is common in other areas of public health. Congressional action is to blame.

“It kind of stopped us dead in our tracks,” said Rosenberg, who is president and chief executive of the Task Force for Global Health.

TVNL Comment: If you listen to the Mike Malloy Show with any regularity...and you should...this would not be a new story at all. Mike has told his listeners many times how the NRA ended Mark Rosenberg's research decades ago.